Our Story

The Founding Story

How It All Began

People often ask about my story, how I met my wife, and how our business got started. So I figured a good place to begin is at the beginning.

I was always an entrepreneur, the kid bugging his parents to do garage sales and lemonade stands, and I even sold pop out of my grade school locker for a dollar apiece.

When I graduated from audio engineering school, where I learned how to record, edit, mix, and produce sound, I opened a small recording studio in London, Ontario, Canada.

On my birthday, an article was published in the local newspaper introducing my studio to the broader business community. Stephanie, who is the co-founder of Voices.com and also my wife, is a classically trained singer. She’d sing at weddings, funerals, and other special events. Her mom would often drive her around to audition for gigs, and had the idea of Stephanie recording her repertoire. Her mom saw the newspaper article, cut it out, and left it for Stephanie to read. Shortly after, she scheduled an appointment to tour the studio. Stephanie and I met, hit it off, and, yes, we did record several songs that many of you have likely heard at weddings.

Because of that same newspaper article, some local businesses, such as a hair salon, and an event management company, contacted me and asked if I could help them record a commercial and a phone system greeting, respectively. Knowing only one female voice in the city, I called up Stephanie and pitched her the idea of doing voice overs. We were officially in business together, with Stephanie as the voice talent, and myself as the audio engineer.

Realizing some modest success in our community, we built a website ourselves, after learning how to code by borrowing books from the local library. It wasn’t long until other voice talent contacted us, asking if they too could be listed on our website. Naturally, we agreed.

At the same time, clients were also contacting us, asking how to get in touch with the talent, as we only listed names and hosted demos. We made the connections and the talent enjoyed the referrals.

Yes, that was the “aha” moment.

What if we could transform our basic brochure-style website into a true marketplace?

What if we could help voice talent get online (remember, building your own website was much harder 10 years ago!) by showcasing their voice through sample audio recordings and describing their vocal abilities, as well as listing previous clients and highlighting studio equipment?

What if we could capture project details in a standardized form, and send them to talent to help inform their auditions?

We were two aspiring entrepreneurs with no business degrees or a marketing background. Recognizing that the odds were stacked against us, we nonetheless set out to create such a website in hopes of helping others.

Through these humble beginnings, we found an appreciation for how hard it is to operate a small business.

We weren’t always Voices.com. When we first launched in 2003, we were called InteractiveVoices.com. It was a mouthful, but it served its purpose.

One of the unique elements about our early service offerings was that each voice talent got a profile on our website, and their address would be, for example, nancy.interactivevoices.com. The name was long and customers often misspelled it. Someone even complained that their fingers got tired from typing it. We were even mistakenly called “voices interactive” or “interactive voice.com.” Furthermore, the name implied that we only provided voices for interactive media, however, the voice talent on our site did much more. They specialized in everything from radio imaging to television commercials, to audiobooks and corporate videos.

With a list of reasons to undergo a name change getting longer by the week, I went on a quest to find the perfect name. Now, this was at the height of the Web 2.0 movement, so we brainstormed snazzy web 2.0 names like Vox, Voxy, and Voxio, but they were either taken or our offers to purchase the domains were declined.

Then it dawned on us; rather than a name change, perhaps a name shortening would be best. After all, switching from InteractiveVoices to Voices was more like cutting our name in half, a helpful simplification.

However, here was only one problem: Voices.com was home to a medical journal called “Silencing the critical voices in your head.” By this time, I had some critical voices in my own head, but I figured, hey, why not put in an offer? What’s the worst that could happen?

I also realized that if the domain owner saw that “InteractiveVoices.com” was putting in an offer for “Voices.com,” he’d likely increase the price and we’d end up paying more than we normally would have.

This is when your relationships with lawyers comes in handy. I approached our lawyer and asked him if he’d approach the seller on our behalf to inquire if he would he sell, and, if so, at what price?

To my surprise we received a reply with the price tag of $50,000. That was more cash than we had on hand, so I proceeded to set up meetings with every financial institution in the city of London. Despite my best efforts, I was unable to raise a single penny for the dream name.

Then, our lawyer taught me an important lesson: Never take no for an answer. He suggested that we go back and counteroffer $30,000 - slightly more than half - and send quarterly payments of $5,000 for the next 6 quarters. That was something we could handle. And you know you what? He accepted!

With a solid legal agreement in place, and for a small investment of $5,000, we were able to relaunch our website and start marketing ourselves as “Voices.com.”

For all the Internet marketers out there, you’ll know that one of 200 factors in Google’s search ranking algorithm is the age of the domain name. Voices.com was registered in 1998, even before Google itself. This was extremely powerful and was likely worth the price tag alone as our web traffic practically doubled overnight.

Today, I can look back and point to the name change and rebranding as a key turning point in our company’s history.

The element that we're most proud of would be something fairly simple; just the ability to have an idea, staying laser-like focused on it, and servicing the needs of this one little slice of the world.

Stephanie and I, with our incredible team, have watched our idea grow into an industry-leading company. We're so proud of how far we've come, and we're looking forward to all that the future holds for Voices.com.